On a golden blue-sky November day, my roommate Tucker and I climbed The Priest in Castle Valley via the spectacular Honeymoon Chimney. On the small summit we discovered this poem in the tattered summit registry, which dated back to the 80's and includes the scribbles of hundreds of elated climbers.
Freedom is pain:
The wolf in winter
slavers at the sight
of trampled crimson snow.
Pain is freedom:
Do not accept
the undertow’s embrace
as did the rocks
ground down to sand.
The gravid light of the moon
is the night’s cold knife.
Open yourself to everything
except the momentary innocence
of your betrayal:
The talons of angels
will pierce you, regardless.
There is no easy way to the summit of the Priest; every path requires significant physical and mental commitment. We read this poem several times on the summit before rapping down to prepare for a late ascent of Fine Jade, which took us up incredible cracks through the golden hour and subtle twilight into the night. I don't know what these words mean exactly, but on that narrow summit it seemed a worthy human effort at grasping what we and all those scribbled names were doing up there on the tip of a precarious dagger of Windgate sandstone in the vast desert of eastern Utah.
Maybe freedom is pain; I spent 2 months on the road this fall, living a simple, dirty, sometimes lonely existence out of my car, waking in the pre-dawn cold many a time to pursue arduous goals on the sheer cliffs of Sierra granite. Maybe pain is freedom; at Indian Creek after Thanksgiving I committed to tortuous sustained ring-locks on an immaculate wall, and despite the excruciating pain in my knuckles and toes, the beauty of the place and the sensation of soaring on the sharp end encouraged me to crank even harder to claim my purchase in that ephemeral place.
As to the last stanza, I do not feel betrayed, but I am grateful for the challenge offered by the steep places of the earth; climbing forces me to return to innocence, again and again. In the vertical world, there is no lying: I am inspired. I am scared. I am desperate to save my own life, and I am elated to feel it pulsing through my straining limbs, one miraculous heartbeat after the next.
Tucker spelunking up the Honeymoon Chimney
preparing for the wild step-across
stickin it
Hale Melnick, fellow rock-scrambler. We met on whimsical outings on block breaks at Colorado College.
Tucker beginning Fine Jade in the late afternoon
"Man will you pass me that #4?" Nick Chambers on the assist.
The windy summit of Fine Jade
Tucker battling the offwidth on Crack Wars, III 5.11
Nick Chambers victorious on the summit of the Priest
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